YouTube is turning into an answer engine with a new conversational search feature

YouTube Premium subscribers in the US (18 years and older) have something new to play with. As reported by The Verge, the company is testing a conversational AI search experience called Ask YouTube that is unlike anything YouTube has offered before.

So what exactly is Ask YouTube?

Instead of typing keywords into a search bar and hoping for the best, you can now ask YouTube a full question and get a response that feels more like a conversation. You can enable this feature using YouTube’s experimental feature. 

Once you do, you will notice an Ask YouTube button built into the YouTube search bar. When you click the search bar, YouTube surfaces suggested prompts like “What caused the 2008 financial crisis?” or “How to fix a stripped screw.” These might be trending searches or based on your own YouTube history. 

You can either search for these trending search terms or enter your own search term and hit the Ask YouTube button to perform the search. When I searched for “prisoners’ dilemma”, YouTube gave me a text overview followed by a featured video. 

Then there were additional videos under different subheadings, including “step-by-step logic of the dilemma” and “real-world applications,” followed by quick concept overviews using shorts. 

I performed multiple searches and found that the search results are a mix of text summaries, long-form videos timestamped to relevant sections, and galleries of YouTube Shorts organized under themed headers. It is a genuinely different experience from the standard search results page.

Does it actually work?

In my limited testing, the AI search worked really well. Not only did it give me an overview of the topic and relevant videos, but I also liked that it sorted them into different categories, giving me an idea of their content. 

Whether it’s better or worse than the normal YouTube search, I cannot comment. I will need to use it for longer to make any such assessment.